Here's a little guide on how to make a dial-in connection to Freesco from a Windows machine. This guide is focused on the purpose of sharing an Internet connection where Freesco is the gateway (router) and Windows is the client. It doesn't discuss null-modem connections nor file-sharing nor other clients than Windows.

For the dial-up client setup, I only have access to Windows 98 in English and Windows 2000 in Spanish, so if someone wants to replace the Spanish bits in that part to English, please do.

I'm rather new to Linux and Freesco myself. Even so, I managed to setup Freesco on a 486 as a router between an always-on Internet connection and a couple of Windows boxes. It came to good use as a print server, too. This was all easy thanks to the simplicity and good guides available. Thanks for that. A guide for dial-in seemed to be lacking, though, so I thought I'd put together my new-found insights on this matter, so here it goes.

One way to do diagnostics on your modem is to use the built in command minicom
from the console after you login, type:

minicom /dev/cua0 [enter]

you will be connected to your modem, type AT [enter] the modem should respond with OK
if not then you need to type the following AT command ATE1V1 [enter] (this sets the modem to echo command responses, and to do so verbosely)
the modem will respond with OK
next type AT&W [enter] (this writes the current config to the modems NVRAM)
AT&F, loads the factory defaults settings to the modems active profile.
ATI followed by a number from 0 to 7 will give you important hardware and firmware info about your modem.
to exit minicom type ~. (tilde period)

When using a modem, you'll need to know its 'init-string'. This is a string of modem commands that will be sent to the modem to 'initialise' it before it starts making its connection. Using the correct modem string improves performance. If you don't know the init-string of your modem, you need to try and find it. Meanwhile, you can try if ATZ, AT&F or AT&F1 will do the trick. These are 3 simple modem init strings that will almost always work, but do not guarantee top performance.